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Intermittent PayPal problem. Confirmation email and order details often absent.

Hi there, I know there have been a lot of posts about this and I've searched them all to no avail. My last resort is posting here.

I've had a zen cart store for several years now and have always used PayPal IPN with very few issues. Until recently when I upgraded from 1.3.8 to 1.3.9h and also changed the fileset of my database from Latin1 to UTF8 to handle Japanese characters properly.

80% of the times when people purchase, a notification comes through from PayPal that someone has paid me, but no order confirmation is being sent to the customer and hence no details of the order are being forwarded to me. The other 20% are fine.

Many people on this forum say PayPal Express Checkout is more stable and more modern. So I installed it and found that due to my "Wordpress on Zen cart" integrated blog (very important for driving new customers my way) there is a problem which renders this PayPal Express module unusable (10727 Shipping Address 1 missing). I can see no answers to this problem on this forum, just people saying it exists. So I'm left with PayPal IPN as my only option (unless anyone knows a workaround here?!).

The really annoying thing is that I can't recreate the issue. Every test order I put through goes through with no problems whatsoever. It doesn't seem to matter where the customers are in the world either, local or international the problem seemingly has no pattern. I've checked all the addresses people gave me and can see no strange characters. My site is based in Japan and customers ordering in Japanese all seem to go through just fine.

Default method likely to be used for communications is: CURL, with the fallback method being FSOCKOPEN if possible.

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I've even removed all wordpress addons which handled the automatic processing of metatags as one thread on this forum said sometimes that causes issues. Still the problem persists.

Here's some logs from a recent English language transaction that went through on PayPal, but was ignored by Zen Cart. Obviously the customer's details have been changed before posting these files here but there were absolutely no strange characters or overly long fields.

Remember: Any code suggestions you see here are merely suggestions. You assume full responsibility for your use of any such suggestions, including any impact ANY alterations you make to your site may have on your PCI compliance.
Furthermore, any advice you see here about PCI matters is merely an opinion, and should not be relied upon as "official". Official PCI information should be obtained from the PCI Security Council directly or from one of their authorized Assessors.

OK, here's the logs for a test transaction I put through fine shortly after the logs that I posted previously didn't go through as they should.

The transactions which don't go through have only two files, the ones which do have three.

Here's the answers to the questions too:

Using Zen1.3.9h. Upgraded from 1.3.8 but had issues during the upgrade so wiped everything off and did a fresh install of 1.3.9h. Connected to the previous database and all seemed ok.

The reason I upgraded was because I was having trouble getting paypal to recognise Japanese characters on their website. If a customer went through checkout and then tried to pay on paypal (IPN) via credit card their information was auto-filled on the paypal form but came out as nonsensical characters... all apart from one field!! Very strange, contacted paypal, and they told me to change the settings on their site so that they see my site as a Japanese language site, no joy. Changed the settings in PayPal so they read my site as UTF8, no joy. Searched many places and ended up changing the collation of the database to UTF_general. Still no joy. Changed the collation again to UTF_unicode and all relevant individual structures and fields to UTF_unicode too. Still no joy. Gave up thinking that it was just something I'd have to live with... then the sales stopped going through properly and I did this a lot:

Site is hosted by JustHost and was all working fine before the fresh install, database alterations and small changes to PayPal settings. I'd like to reset everything in the database back to latin1 (it all worked then) but am unsure of how much damage I'll do to the database itself by doing this and also if this would solve the issue. I've seen some posts Dr Byte has commented on where he never advises this action as it can corrupt the data. I read that post after making the changes and did this again:

Thanks for any help in advance, I've got a magazine article going out to a possible 500,000 people on March 30th and if this isn't sorted by then, I'm in deep .

Remember: Any code suggestions you see here are merely suggestions. You assume full responsibility for your use of any such suggestions, including any impact ANY alterations you make to your site may have on your PCI compliance.
Furthermore, any advice you see here about PCI matters is merely an opinion, and should not be relied upon as "official". Official PCI information should be obtained from the PCI Security Council directly or from one of their authorized Assessors.

Would I be right in thinking I should upload the one from the 1.3.9h source files and overwrite the one currently live? Chances of this being the main problem? Light at the end of this long dark tunnel?!

Remember: Any code suggestions you see here are merely suggestions. You assume full responsibility for your use of any such suggestions, including any impact ANY alterations you make to your site may have on your PCI compliance.
Furthermore, any advice you see here about PCI matters is merely an opinion, and should not be relied upon as "official". Official PCI information should be obtained from the PCI Security Council directly or from one of their authorized Assessors.

Thanks, Dr Byte. I've uploaded the 1.3.9h paypal files again as it seems a few of them were the wrong version. I've also done a test sale and it went through fine (although this doesn't mean that live sales will go through any better as I can't replicate the problem).

Is there anything else you or anyone can see with the information I've given here that could cause issues? Database for example? Just wanna make sure I've asked all I can.

I'll be getting a whole load of live sales from March 30th 2012 so it'd be great if this thread could be kept open for a little while. I'll post back early-mid March and let you know if the problem is solved.

Remember: Any code suggestions you see here are merely suggestions. You assume full responsibility for your use of any such suggestions, including any impact ANY alterations you make to your site may have on your PCI compliance.
Furthermore, any advice you see here about PCI matters is merely an opinion, and should not be relied upon as "official". Official PCI information should be obtained from the PCI Security Council directly or from one of their authorized Assessors.